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Professionalization of football talent development has had a widespread influence on the lives of Norwegian footballers. The football and educational aspects of their identities converge in their decisions on upper secondary education, where the option of a sports school programme significantly influences how talent development is practised. This article employed an abductive research protocol in a case study, conducting two rounds of interviews with five players and five coaches from an elite football club academy under-17 team. Drawing on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, instrumental and communicative rationality are used to analyse and discuss how talented players’ identities are influenced and used for clubs practice increasing role in narrowing down the players’ options and thus decreasing their scope for communicative rationality. This limits their identity formation, as pursuing an SSP increasingly becomes the only path available to them.
Anders Belling (Thu,) studied this question.